We should start with the question I posed, as this is the crux of the issue here, and without it, everything else here is moot. I will endeavor to set it out as clearly as I can.
As you put great weight on the 'hard problem' being an insurmountable one for (and only for) materialism, I am sure you are well aware of the seminal importance, for that premise, of what has become known as the 'Knowledge Argument' from Frank Jackson's paper "Epiphenomenal Qualia", and in particular, a thought experiment from that paper which goes by several names (such as 'Mary the Neuroscientist'), and which was called, by the philosopher Philip Goff, "the greatest argument against materialism."
This argument has several antecedents, including C. D. Broad's argument that chemistry cannot tell us what ammonia smells like, and, as I mentioned in my previous post, Russells aphorism "it is obvious that a man who can see knows things that a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics." All these arguments are doing essentially the same thing: pumping the intuition that knowing what it is like to see colors (or have any other phenomenal experience) is not something that could ever be learned by studying the physical sciences (I say they pump the intuition because it is not actually an established fact that the premise is correct, but to be clear, I think it is, at least for human consciousness.)
There is a certain amount of indirection at work here, in specifying only the physical sciences. We get an equally valid question by substituting other academic disciplines for the physical sciences, and in particular, of course, any philosophy of mind: they do not get a pass on this by being anti-materialist, and certainly any philosophy - such as idealism - which is premised first and foremost on the reality and significance of the hard problem, will have to confront this question (among many others) before it can be regarded as the solution to this problem and as providing an explanation of consciousness.
Your reply is apparently that in this respect, idealism is no different than materialism - it will not enable Russell's blind man to know what it is like to see - from which it follows that the knowledge argument cannot be used by idealists against materialism. I am interested in learning, then, what you - and, by extension, idealists - regard as convincing arguments for there being a hard problem for materialism, specifically.
I think that I (finally) understand your question (maybe). Are you asking why the hard problem would apply to materialism, but not to idealism?
If that's indeed the question, the simplest answer is that if reality is fundamentally material, then by extension everything must be material, including consciousness. For reasons already stated (the mind-body problem, the hard problem, etc), the emergence of experiential consciousness as we know it from inert matter is opaque. We don't have a shred of evidence to support it, nor the sliver of a clue to go on.
Conversely, if reality is taken to be fundamentally consciousness, then everything is consciousness. Everything becomes a "figment". There's nothing actually "physical". This is conceivable in theory. One obvious example are our dreams where a reality is projected and interacted with by consciousness. This position isn't subject to the hard problem since everything in reality is all just one thing, consciousness.
Panpsychism and other dualisms just postpone the problems of materialism. But they resurface later, in addition to the new problem that this position requires to be granted at least two fundamental magic tricks to explain the rest.
> I say they pump the intuition because it is not actually an established fact that the premise is correct, but to be clear, I think it is, at least for human consciousness.
I don't see what's being pumped. As we know from the incompleteness theorem, some truths cannot be proven. The fact of our awareness is another that's often doubted by the same people that doubt the divide separating qualia and conceptual knowing. Has their difficulty to grasp at these intuitions somehow become the burden of those who access them as self-evident?
The hard problem is a linchpin. For those who get it, materialism starts to unravel. Those who don't, think those who do are making stuff up, but they also can't give a single example to counter the argument, nor can they conceive for themselves an entirely novel experience purely out of thought. They can't imagine a new color, think a new taste, conceive of a new sense.
> Your reply is apparently that in this respect, idealism is no different than materialism - it will not enable Russell's blind man to know what it is like to see - from which it follows that the knowledge argument cannot be used by idealists against materialism.
As I said, idealism is only a philosophy. It's mostly a process of elimination resting on conjectures such as the hard problem. As possibilities are removed, remaining candidates hint at the likeliest direction, but it's indeed not a final realization. There are some metaphysical speculations resting atop the foundations that reality is mind first. But I'm personally much less invested in speculations. I find the challenge of pulling our cultural head out of the sand of implausibility more of a concern.
Depending how curious (and open-minded) you are about "knowledge" that get the "blind man to know what it is like to see", I'd suggest to look into practices that have this as their main goal. They're about engaging consciousness directly with immediate experience (the senses) and existential curiosity (I am aware that I am, but what am I?) to cultivate the seed of an eventual realization. They're known under the umbrella term "nonduality". As an introduction, I suggest this selection of texts spanning multiple nondual traditions aggregated and read by a Buddhist nun https://www.youtube.com/@SamaneriJayasara.
You say you are concerned with the challenge of pulling our cultural head out of [what you perceive as] the sand of implausibility - well, in that case, I'm the sort of person whose concerns you should be addressing: I don't think the hard problem (if there is one in the form it is conceived of by its proponents) is any harder for materialism than it is for any of the alternatives, but I am willing to give all due consideration to arguments that it is (and by "due consideration", I mean outside of internet discussion threads, even though my wife has banned me playing audio books and podcasts on the topic over the speakers when we are in a car together.)
Unfortunately, your responses in this thread are not making the sort of arguments that are called for by your stated goal. Here, your response continues the theme of reasserting how obvious it seems to you that there is a hard problem which rules out materialism. This is not an argument, it is a belief. You are, of course, entitled to your beliefs, and I am sure you hold them strongly and sincerely, but the fact that you do does not establish that our cultural head is stuck in the sands of implausibility. Repetition does not make them more argument-like, nor does calling them "self-evident", nor insinuating that you see more clearly than others, nor wrapping them in language that might be appropriate for something that has an obvious proof. It is not enough, for an argument, to state propositions that other people who already agree with you will also agree with; that's just preaching to the choir.
For the same reason, your complaint that no counter-arguments are being made falls short: counter-arguments are made to arguments, not unargued opinions.
At this point, I suspect you may be thinking that a commitment to materialism is also a belief - and I would agree! The simple fact is that no -ism has delivered an explanation of consciousness, and when someone tries to tell me it is a fact that that consciousness is just a computation (or a non-computable physical process, Searle and Penrose), I point out that no-one has explained it in those terms.
Nevertheless, there is a counter-argument here, and it is in my previous post, where I argue that the knowledge argument - which is widely regarded as the strongest argument for there being a hard problem that only affects materialism - is exactly as problematic, for any other putative explanation of consciousness, as it is for materialism (which does not rule out it being an illusory problem for any of them.) I may not have been completely clear about what it is and why it matters here, so I will make another attempt.
The 'hard problem' is the claim that phenomenal consciousness and its associated qualia present an insurmountable challenge to materialism. Many people feel - sometimes strongly - that this is obviously so, but philosophers and scientists alike (and on both sides of the fence) rightly expect more justification for accepting this claim than these feelings of incredulity towards materialism.
From your own account here, the hard problem is a necessary prerequisite for idealism: it is, as you said, a linchpin, and it is so in this sense: all the other claims you have made about idealism rest on there being a hard problem to take materialism out of consideration.
Furthermore, for idealism to prevail over materialism, the hard problem must only exist for materialism (or, at least, not present a challenge to idealism), or else idealism would be saddled with exactly the same problem as materialism - a problem that you insist is insurmountable.
So, putting the previous three paragraphs together, the proponents of idealism need a justification for there being a hard problem that applies only to materialism and not to idealism.
In the years of reading papers and other scholarly articles on the issue, I have been struck by how often such justifications ultimately rest on some form of the knowledge argument (at least in this sense, Goff is entirely justified in calling it "the greatest argument against materialism.") To recap, this is the argument which boils down to "you can't learn what it is like to see colors from any physics book."
Does this satisfy idealism's need for justification for the premise that there's a hard problem for materialism that does not apply to idealism itself? It does not, as we can simply substitute 'idealism book' for 'physics book', and the knowledge argument itself gives us no reason to think that the outcome will be any different. In fact, in your first response to this issue, you affirmed that knowing all of a completed idealist philosophy would do no better, in this regard, than knowing all of completed physics.
Furthermore - and this is important - we can see that the knowledge argument is equally applicable to any field of what Torin Alter calls 'discursively learnable' knowledge without making any assumptions about the truth of materialism.
Therefore, in the account of and justification for idealism in what you have written so far, there is at least one piece (the linchpin, no less) missing: an acceptable justification for thinking that there is a hard problem that does not present an equal problem for idealism. You entered this thread in a very assertive manner (your first sentence was " Perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of 'feelings'. But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths", and in your latest post, you adopted the mantle of someone who is pulling our collective heads from the sands of implausibility), but your responses have not, so far, lived up to this rhetoric.
> "you can't learn what it is like to see colors from any physics book."
Why is it an argument against materialism?
To know what it is like to see colors you need to put your brain in a state in which other people's brain gets when they see colors. Physics book simply does not do that by itself.
But if you use learned physics, to electrically stimulate the right neurons in your brain, you can learn what it is like to see colors without ever seeing colors or having eyes.
Even in normal experience the brain is being stimulated. So theoretically, you wouldn't need eyes to experience color. You would only need to replicate the physical properties at the onset of brain activity. Those are called neural correlates of consciousness. However, there's the byproduct as the result of that activity, the experience associated with it. If reality is fundamentally material, there are two possible implications: (1) the very experience itself is physical. That is, the inherent experiences of smelling, or tasting, or seeing a color, in themselves have to be physical. The challenge with this is that we don't know the nature of that physical property and we have no evidence for it (besides counting consciousness itself as evidence, which is begging the question). (2) There's also the view that, rather than the correlates causing the experience, they are the experience. The challenge here becomes to demonstrate which correlate maps to exactly which experience (and not another). Neither of (1) or (2) have been successfully demonstrated.
It is true that neither 1 nor 2 have been successfully demonstrated, but there is quite a double standard here: you claim that idealism has the answers to questions about the mind, but you have not shown it explaining anything. Deducing the reality of idealism from the absence of answers to 1 or 2 is exactly like saying, in 1950, that as biology has not identified the biochemical correlates of cell reproduction, life must be fundamental (I know some people hold this view today, but it is at best a niche view that generates little controversy in either philosophy or science.)
The short answer is that, when the argument is fully set out, one of the conditions is that stimulating one's optic nerve does not count, but it often goes unmentioned. This is rarely an issue (and is easily corrected if it is), as it quickly becomes apparent that allowing stimulation does not even present a prima facie problem and so no-one on either side of the fence finds it at all interesting or useful - the anti-materialists are not interested in this question because they will agree with materialists that if stimulation is allowed, then Mary (the protagonist in the thought experiment) will experience colors, and the materialists are not interested in it because the anti-materialists are not using it.
Nevertheless, it is a good question as to why the knowledge argument would be seen as so persuasive by so many, including by quite a few materialists, who seem to me to go to unnecessary lengths to get around what is not even a problem (illusionism, for example, where it is claimed that phenomenal experience is merely an illusion - but then, as the anti-materialists ask, who is being fooled, and about what?)
Perhaps the first thing to say is that the argument is not presented as the stark observation that you cannot learn what seeing colors is like from reading a physics book; that's what you end up with when you whittle it down to its essentials.
Secondly, there are a couple of features of the argument which make it easy to let its difficulties slide right on by. One of these is what I have been going on about here: by framing the argument in terms of a knowledge of physics, it is easy to miss that it applies to any academic knowledge, not only physics or the physical sciences, and thus including any non-materialist theory. The second is that it uses the word 'knowledge' for two different forms of retained information: sensory information which is acquired directly from sensory experience, and linguistic information which is encoded in sensory information without being that sensory information itself. These are separate domains (the information content of a word is not the information content of the sound when it is heard or of its appearance when read), yet, by referring to both of them as knowledge, the argument invites the reader to accept the way it equivocates between the two, which it does when it points out that the knowledge that can be acquired linguistically does not include the 'raw feels' (yes, that is a term used in the philosophy of mind) of sensory information.
Having said all that, I am still surprised how many people think the argument shows there is a problem for materialism. After all, the physical sciences have explained many sorts of complex phenomena (hurricanes, for example), and no-one thinks that the act of explaining (or learning the explanation of) how hurricanes work should actually create one - yet anyone accepting the knowledge argument is tacitly accepting that if the phenomenon being explained is sensory experience, then an explanation should produce the phenomenon being explained! (but only if it is a materialist explanation!) I guess it somehow doesn't seem paradoxical to many people when both the phenomenon being explained and its explanation are in one's mind.
I think you would be very surprised by how many papers have been, and are still being written about this argument or something following directly from it. Because I have read some of them on academia.edu, I frequently get notices about more. Interestingly, Frank Jackson himself has changed his mind on the matter, but that has had no effect on how influential his argument still is (and, to be fair, it shouldn't.)
I neither recognize in my discourse a sermon targeted at the choir (our psalms are way past this), nor do I feel an obligation on my part to convince you. I don't even register as a blame my failure to communicate my "belief" to you, especially since you say that you were already acquainted with those arguments, which you've looked into in the past, but also failed then to integrate. I doubt that I'd fare any better than your past attempts. For that matter, I also doubt that you're my target audience. But that's totally fine.
I'm indeed interested to blow fresh wind to a more parsimonious direction to our cultural view of reality. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, I don't see much value in debating the subject to the point of sophistry. Philosophy is not my day job. My interest in it is as a tool that informs a practical orientation. Does matter give rise to consciousness? Mounting evidence points to the contrary. To me this is practical. If what you're after is ironclad proof, you won't find it and personally I don't see the practical point.
Opposing views to the knowledge argument take two general forms. Either they deny the distinction between phenomenal experience and conceptual knowing (e.g. Dennett). Or they concede that divide, but posit that phenomenal experience could still be physical in nature, but built into this is a requirement to account today, for some unknown property of matter, of which we have exactly zero evidence and that we might never discover (e.g. Alvin). I personally see either as a cop-out. You're free to assign them the value you see fit and even to think that they successfully reduce the idealist intuition to mere beliefs. I think I recognize glimpses of the tangent the discussion is taking and would rather avoid venturing in ever speculative terrains, that hinge on hopes that some day, some big reveal in physics will be retrofitted to what is currently a baseless, hasty, and problematic assumption. From experience, this tends to drag on and people interested in that sort of exercises tend to already have a somewhat significant, even if tacit, commitment to materialism. No argument will be sufficient, as new pseudo-counters are sought out to justify the hold out.
I think it's best for me to conclude this exchange here. I'll echo the O.P.'s suggested paths of exploration, books/articles/videos by Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman, who contrary to me, have invested copious amounts of energy to make the modern views of idealism accessible. Their arguments go into details about what I've only evoked as bullet points throughout the thread. They attack the subject from physics, biology, philosophy, neuroscience, and sometimes even venture into the spiritual (why not, if consciousness is indeed fundamental).
Thank you for an interesting discussion. I hope you find the answers you're looking for.
Firstly, I have only just now noticed that you posted two consecutive responses a couple of days ago, and I only responded to the second. In the first, you write " conversely, if reality is taken to be fundamentally consciousness, then everything is consciousness... This position isn't subject to the hard problem since everything in reality is all just one thing, consciousness."[1] Well, we can also say that a materialist theory of consciousness would not be subject to the hard problem, because, in that case, there clearly isn't one, by definition! This is even before we get into the question of what, if anything, it means to say that reality is fundamentally consciousness.
Turning now to your latest post, in your third paragraph, you offer some sort of response to the knowledge argument issue, but it both misrepresents the full scope of materialist responses to the argument, and, more relevantly here, completely misses the point to which that argument is being used in this discussion.
While the latter renders the former moot, I will, for completeness, say something about it. Firstly, I know (from private correspondence) that Daniel Dennett considered "What RoboMary Knows" to contain the essentials of his response to the knowledge argument. In it, he argues that if we had a different neural architecture - one in which we could directly examine and modify the detailed physical state of our brains - then learning what it is like to see colors could be done discursively. The fact that we humans cannot do this is, therefore, a contingent fact of biology which poses no challenge to materialism.
Secondly, you are once again completely mistaken in your guesses about what I think. Personally, I don't feel that the opponents of materialism have shown that consciousness will prove to be inexplicable without new physics, any more than are other biological processes such as metabolism or reproduction. Dennett's response to the knowledge argument is not predicated on new physics, and (while I don't think they are very helpful) neither are the arguments from the phenomenal concepts wing. Part of the rhetorical genius of Jackson's argument is that it nudges readers down the path of thinking that materialism will need new physics to prevail, but, as shown above, no such conclusion is warranted.[2]
Thirdly, though I'm not positing any new physics, I can still note that your characterization of those views as postulating something "of which we have exactly zero evidence and that we might never discover" is rather breathtakingly ironic, given how you are going about justifying idealism. As for avoiding debating the subject to the point of sophistry, I think that would be very helpful here.
As I said, though, this is moot, as it misses the point. I had hoped to forestall this outcome by pointing out that the question I posed is not predicated on any assumption of the truth of materialism, but it seems I should have said more about why that matters, so I will do so now. The question is this: why does the knowledge argument, when cast in terms of complete knowledge of idealism, not establish that there is a hard problem for idealism, just as the corresponding physical-knowledge argument allegedly does for materialism? Instead of replying to that question, you have offered some sort of defense of the knowledge argument against materialism - but the more strongly you promote the latter, the more strongly you support the view that the corresponding knowledge argument against idealism needs a substantive response (I have, of course, just referenced an argument that it is not actually a problem for materialism, but if you were to seize on that argument for your own purpose, it would raise the question "what hard problem?" - if the best and arguably only argument for there being a hard problem is no more (or no less) applicable to idealism than it is to materialism, you cannot use it to establish that there is a hard problem for materialism alone.)
If idealism really does provide an explanation of consciousness, you should have no difficulty responding to this issue, but instead, we have circled around it three times now without getting any closer to a solution. As you yourself put it, the hard problem is the linchpin of idealism: without it, all your arguments for it being the only viable non-materialist option are beside the point. [3]
Well, so much for the third paragraph, but quite a bit of your latest reply is taken up with other, incidental, matters, such as whether at least some of your arguments amount to preaching to the choir. Let's look at a definition, and from Merriam Webster, we have "to speak for or against something to people who already agree with one's opinions." I think we can leave it to third parties to decide for themselves whether your claim that materialism is obviously false for those who "get" qualia (in the right way, of course) fits that definition.
Furthermore, when we put together your statements that, on the one hand, that you are are attempting to pull our collective heads out of the sands of implausibility and blow fresh wind to a more parsimonious direction to our cultural view of reality, while on the other, that you don't have to take into account (or, apparently, respond substantively to) the apparently awkward questions I have been raising, then we can see that you are more interested in the one-way delivery of ideas than in dialogue, which comes across as rather preachy.
Your posts have been moving in the direction of a motte-and-bailey argument. In your first paragraph of your first post in this thread, you were squarely in the bailey, writing "perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of "feelings". But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths [my emphasis]. If you seriously go into this, the only possibilities left once you've dug and eliminated all mistaken assumptions are not material", but now, with "does matter give rise to consciousness? Mounting evidence points to the contrary", you have at least one foot in the motte. I am not, as you put it, after ironclad proof, just arguments strong enough to justify the certainty with which you have, at least up to now, presented idealism.
I thank you for your kind wishes in your last paragraph and I wish the same for you. I imagine you will have more success in that than I will, as I am quite demanding in what I expect in an explanation, and the mind is a hard problem, even if it is not the hard problem.
[2] Penrose has a different argument for that, one that is most commonly rejected on account of its assumption that materialism based on known physics entails that human minds must be logically consistent reasoners.
[3] At least one of those arguments - the one from parsimony - is problematic in its own right: the one and only essential property that any hypothesis of the mental needs in order to prevail is that it actually explains minds, and, so far, we have seen none from any position, materialism included (I am well aware that quite a few physicists think physics will continue to deliver parsimonious theories (The Elegant Universe, and so forth), but that, too, is a belief for which even the inductive form (so far, it has been that way) has a rather obvious confirmation bias problem.)
As you put great weight on the 'hard problem' being an insurmountable one for (and only for) materialism, I am sure you are well aware of the seminal importance, for that premise, of what has become known as the 'Knowledge Argument' from Frank Jackson's paper "Epiphenomenal Qualia", and in particular, a thought experiment from that paper which goes by several names (such as 'Mary the Neuroscientist'), and which was called, by the philosopher Philip Goff, "the greatest argument against materialism."
This argument has several antecedents, including C. D. Broad's argument that chemistry cannot tell us what ammonia smells like, and, as I mentioned in my previous post, Russells aphorism "it is obvious that a man who can see knows things that a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics." All these arguments are doing essentially the same thing: pumping the intuition that knowing what it is like to see colors (or have any other phenomenal experience) is not something that could ever be learned by studying the physical sciences (I say they pump the intuition because it is not actually an established fact that the premise is correct, but to be clear, I think it is, at least for human consciousness.)
There is a certain amount of indirection at work here, in specifying only the physical sciences. We get an equally valid question by substituting other academic disciplines for the physical sciences, and in particular, of course, any philosophy of mind: they do not get a pass on this by being anti-materialist, and certainly any philosophy - such as idealism - which is premised first and foremost on the reality and significance of the hard problem, will have to confront this question (among many others) before it can be regarded as the solution to this problem and as providing an explanation of consciousness.
Your reply is apparently that in this respect, idealism is no different than materialism - it will not enable Russell's blind man to know what it is like to see - from which it follows that the knowledge argument cannot be used by idealists against materialism. I am interested in learning, then, what you - and, by extension, idealists - regard as convincing arguments for there being a hard problem for materialism, specifically.